If you read nothing else I’ve linked here today, go and read this post at The Progressive Review by its editor, Sam Smith.
Smith details how the “arrogant, autistic, and amoral class of late 20th century MBAs” have managed to spread the pernicious nothingness of mass capitalism into every avenue of American life over the past quarter-century.
The tragedy is that each of the infected cultures, organizations and individuals once had their own culture that often was infinitely more appealing, intelligent, inspiriting and honest than that which has sullied it. Why is the corporate and business school tradition preferable to that of the church, the artist, the non-profit, the political movement or education? Is politics just branding, is art just a product, is education just a learning process, would Martin Luther King have done better if he had gone to business rather than theological school? Each of these traditions have centuries of wisdom and experience behind them, but all that is increasingly put aside to fit the corporate model.
We pay for this in numerous ways. Some are obvious such as political candidates and public officials carefully avoiding real issues in favor of creating artificial images of themselves, backed by such words as “hope” and “change.” And if you don’t join with the change huckster, you are accused of “fear of change.”
A few years back I put it this way: “A cursory examination of American business suggests that its major product is wasted energy. Compute all the energy loss created by corporate lawyers, Washington lobbyists, marketing consultants, CEO benefits, advertising agencies, leadership seminars, human resource supervisors, strategic planners and industry conventions and it is amazing that this country has any manufacturing base at all. We have created an economy based not on actually doing anything, but on facilitating, supervising, planning, managing, analyzing, tax advising, marketing, consulting or defending in court what might be done if we had time to do it. The few remaining truly productive companies become immediate targets for another entropic activity, the leveraged buyout.” And this was all before the rise of the killer hedge fund.
It is tempting just to copy-paste the whole post right here, but I will limit myself to those two pull quotes. This is not a “things were better in the good old days” rant by a jaded ex-hippie; this, my friends, is the straight and unvarnished truth. Our fascination with “red vs blue”, “black vs white”, “Coke vs Pepsi”, whatever is strictly for show, keeping us distracted while the legions of lawyers and regiments of MBAs systematically gut everything we cherish, reduce it to “product”, then discard it when the product is no longer sufficiently profitable. The very world itself is now reduced to an item of consumption which has been overexploited so badly that we may cause our own extinction.
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, just so we [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT. Since you cannot click [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and neatly into [...]
